Fig. 1

The Central Dogma (CD) of Molecular Biology vs. the core tenet of Synthetic Biology. The original formulation of the CD by Francis Crick (left) states that information is unidirectional, from nucleic acid to protein, never the other way around (Cobb, 2017). Yet, note that information flow is also deployed in the functioning of metabolic networks (as recently proposed: de Lorenzo et al., 2014). On the contrary, Synthetic Biology (right) puts the emphasis on the relational and compositional logic of living systems, both those existing already and those that can be designed in the future